When Intel talked about Haswell during IDF 2012, the chipmaker pointed out that it will have 5%- 15% gains over Ivy Bridge when set on same clocks, but Intel was aiming to gain big gains in lesser power consumption, especially for notebooks and smaller form factors. Even now there are NUC units with Intel Haswell series processors. The micro-architecture allows higher idle power states and lesser active power.

The processor lineup codenamed ‘Haswell’ is the second Intel processor family to use 22nm fabrication, but the chipmaker emphasizes more on a system-on-chip implementation, though the desktop variant comes with on an LGA1150. However, overclocking these processors would require fine tuning, and a good enough motherboard.

Intel also stated that Haswell has media engine improvements during IDF 2012 by introducing hardware-based scalable video coding along with hardware motion JPEG decoder and MPEG2 hardware encoding, as pointed out below:

I’ve received this chip from Intel with their Intel Z87KLT-75K motherboard, but unfortunately the motherboard’s UEFI controls doesn’t let me switch off one of their C1, Intel Speed step and turbo without giving me an option to overclock via Intel XTU. Keeping them on does let me change the core clock speed on XTU, but sadly by doing so the power to the processor and the clock speed is controlled by SpeedStep, C1E and/or Turbo, which means it would not run on a static clock speed on all benchmarks.

It was able to overclock with 4.6 GHz with a shared XTU profile, but its not practical and accurate to test the processor boost difference between the stock and overclocked setup with Turbo and power saving features dynamically changing the processor’s clock speeds. It seems to be a good motherboard, but its more designed for OEMs. That may explain why I cannot change the core clock speed after disabling the SpeedStep, C1E and/or Turbo. In any case, Intel is exiting from motherboard business overall.

Intel 4770K is a flagship processor, and ‘K’ series denotes the feature to overclock and fine-tune your overclocked system. 4770K is a quad core with 8 threads with a default clock speed of 3.5 GHz with Turbo pushing the clock speed up to 3.9 GHz. It comes with an onboard Intel HD Graphic 4600 clocked at 350MHz on stock and maximum dynamic frequency of up to 1.25GHz. The processor has 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes, which allows 1x 16, 2×8 and 1×8/2x 4 PCIE x16 configuration. Haswell supports dual channel memory architecture of up to 32GB and has 8MB Cache.